Oaks leans against the doorframe, watching me take it in, and his expression is controlled the way it always is in daylight, but his eyes track me like they’re listening.
“You sure?” he asks.
It’s the same question he asked when he handed me the cut, and it hits the same way, not demanding, not possessive, just checking, like he’s making sure I’m choosing this with my eyes open.
I nod. “Yeah.”
He steps into the room then, boots quiet on the floor, and reaches for me like he’s done it a thousand times already. His hands settle on my hips, thumbs pressing into the small of my back, and the contact steadies something in me that the town can’t reach.
“This ain’t her house,” he says low. “It’s mine. And now it’s yours too.”
Something in my chest loosens at that, because it’s so simple and so firm that it makes all the what-ifs in my head go quiet for a breath. I look down at my empty hand. I don’t think he’ll propose until my name is officially cleared of any wrongdoing in Bethany’s death.
“I don’t want to replace her,” I admit, and the honesty surprises me, because I’ve been pretending so hard to be unbothered that it’s almost become a habit.
“You ain’t replacing nobody,” he says.
The way he says it, without venom, without drama, feels final, like he’s closed a door that’s been banging in my mind.
I slide my hands up his chest and feel the warmth of him under my palms, the steady rise and fall of his breathing, the solid reality of him, and my body responds before my brain can argue, because my body has never been good at pretending it doesn’t want what it wants.
He dips his head and kisses me slow, not like the desperate lake night, not like the frantic cabin with the door locked and the curtains drawn, but like he has all the time in the world and he intends to use it. The kiss ain’t about hunger, not at first. It’s about certainty, about the way he anchors me in his space and doesn’t apologize for it.
His hands move over me carefully. When he lifts me onto the edge of the bed it ain’t the desperate kind of need that makes your heart race. It’s the steady kind that makes you feel claimed without being owned, held without being trapped.
“This look right on you?” he murmurs against my mouth, slipping an engagement ring onto my finger.
I catch the faintest flicker of humor in his eyes when I snort like I’m not blushing.
“It’s perfect,” I murmur back.
He makes a low sound that might’ve been a laugh if it didn’t come out like a growl.
“My ol’ lady,” he says, and his hands tighten at my hips, just enough to remind me there’s steel under the gentleness.
Then there’s the slow unraveling of tension we’ve carried for months, but it ain’t about proving anything to anyone. It ain’t about drowning out guilt with sex. It’s about building, about rewriting what belongs to us instead of to the past. I feel the difference in my bones when he kisses down my throat and whispers my name like it’s something he’s finally allowed to keep.
“Mine,” he whispers.
The house doesn’t feel haunted when he pulls me down into the mattress and I lace my fingers behind his neck. Or whenmy body relaxes into his like it knows him. Or when he moves his cock into me with a kind of deliberate care that says he ain’t taking, he’s choosing, again and again as he thrusts. At long last, after the lake, after the blood, after the courthouse steps, I stop holding my breath.
I let go.
Later, tangled in sheets, I rest my head against his chest and listen to his heartbeat.
Outside, a motorcycle roars somewhere down the road, because the town never really sleeps, and neither do rumors.
A week later, I’m back at Slice of Paradise, because I refuse to let Hell shrink my world down to a basement room and a headline. The first time I walk in wearing the cut over a simple tee and jeans, the bell above the door jingles like it always has, coffee smells the same, the booths still stick, and the pie case still fogs up when the kitchen gets too hot.
The place looks exactly like it did when I was just a girl trying to make money and avoid getting swallowed by everybody else’s opinions, and that’s the point. I want normal, even if it’s ugly.
Conversations pause for half a breath.
Then they continue.
I slide into my usual booth and open my menu even though I know it by heart, because the ritual matters more than the options. Two women at the counter lean close, and I brace myself out of habit, ready for the sting.
“That’s her,” one whispers.
